Facebook’s Hiring: Blockchain Experts

As per the job board, the company is hiring different experts spanning from business product and business operations managers to software engineers and even a technology communications director in the space.

Bitcoinist reported earlier in February that the company ‘acqui-hired’ a blockchain startup called Chainspace.

As previously noted by a spokesperson from Facebook, the company is exploring different ways to leverage blockchain technology.

Are We Getting Closer to ‘Facecoin’?

In addition to the currently available blockchain-related positions at Facebook, the company’s official LinkedIn page also reveals that there’s a position for a Technical Program Manager, Marketplace Payments, Blockchain specialist.

While the position is no longer accepting applications, this could add more weight to the report, which started circulating in late 2018 that Facebook is working on a stablecoin allowing WhatsApp users to transfer money in-app.

As outlined by anonymous sources familiar with the matter, Facebook’s initial target will be the lucrative remittance market in India as the regulatory landscape there are starting to take shape.

The company’s blockchain effort gained substantial momentum back in August 2018 when David Marcus, a former member of Coinbase’s board of directors stepped into Facebook to spearhead a “new group around blockchain”.

According to LinkedIn, this “small” group has grown substantially, as there are currently 49 employees with their business profiles stating they’re occupied on the company’s blockchain arm.

The bigger story here, however, is that the floodgates have been officially opened by banking giant JPMorgan. Last week, it unveiled its ‘JPM Coin’ virtual currency.

Now, with the social media giant ramping up its blockchain effort, don’t be surprised if Facebook serves up a ‘Facecoin’ in the near future.

What do you think of Facebook’s involvement in the field of blockchain? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!

Not only do they still have $2 million left from their initial ICO in 2015 (when those things were legal) but they also have millions of dollars worth of BTC, ETH, and NEO.

Live from DevCon, there’s no understating Da’s magnetic charisma. But Layer 2 solutions, platform instability, and scalability are all issues that the Chinese team will have to overcome if it wants to realize its vision of being the number one blockchain by 2020.

Da Hongfei, NEO DevCon, author image

I caught up with Da Hongfei at their developer event in Seattle, where, among other news, they announced that they would be making the Pacific Northwestern city a new NEO home. No coincidence that Seattle also houses the world’s biggest software company or that its leader there is John DeVadoss, ex Microsoft MD.

What Drew Da Hongfei Towards Decentralized Technologies?

Coming from what many call a hierarchical society in China, I was curious as to what drew Da Hongfei to a decentralized technology? He smiles, explaining that he believes human society is like circles, moving from a decentralized society to a hierarchical one, to becoming more flat, and decentralized.

So even if some more conservative societies the trend is still to give more freedom to individuals, from the tendency of the past few decades China is becoming a more free market economy and that is why we are doing these decentralized distributed solutions.

NEO is an open network for the smart economy. But, where does Da see that happening first? What vertical is primed to adapt the fastest to blockchain tech?

It will happen to the industry that’s already highly digital. It probably will happen to a new industry or economic sector. As you can see with DApps, for now, gaming is the most popular one, gaming is 100 percent virtual, digital. So it is easier to work with something completely new that’s completely digital.

Where Will the Smart Economy Happen?

In fact, of the 100 or so DApps on NEO, by far the most popular are gaming. Yet, their vision of a smart economy is about so much more than geeks with joysticks. But can a smart economy only happen in urban centers, or will the whole world become digital?

NEO believes in the smart economy, author image

I do believe that eventually, the whole world will become digital, I don’t think it will happen in those rural areas first, although, we can take the payment system as an example.

In China, the credit card is not very popular. Most people don’t own a credit card but because China is developing really fast, we just skipped the credit card and moved to an electronic, mobile payment. We use AliPay and WeChatPay… It is much more convenient.

He goes on to explain that in China, you can pay for pretty much anything anywhere with your mobile phone, from basic toiletries to public transportation. This is still something basically alien in Europe or the USA.

You can even donate to homeless people, they sometimes have a bar code! So, it’s the same for the smart economy, it probably will emerge in some society or area that’s not very good at current infrastructure but are really catching up very fast.

Blockchain is an Institutional Technology

During his speech on stage, Da explained his vision of blockchain technology as being an ‘institutional technology’. Seeing as we usually hear about blockchain being called ‘public’ and ‘peer to peer’, I wanted to know why.

He concedes that he didn’t always see it that way. Back in 2014, there was almost no talk of the word blockchain. All the focus was on Bitcoin and a few other altcoins. Da says:

After 2014, bankers realized that some geeks invented a protocol that could transfer value across countries in a few minutes. So they are curious about the technology and they abstracted it and called it blockchain.

I think only after post-2015 or maybe 2016, people started to think that blockchain could be used to establish a new kind of collaboration between individuals, between different entities. They invented or borrowed words like DAC (decentralized autonomous company) and then Vitalik changed it to DAO. I think after that people gradually realized it could be used to build new institutions. That is when I realized it was a new institutional technology.

Let’s Recap on What’s Coming in NEO 3.0

Walking back to NEO 3.0 and its ambitious but highly technical upgrades, can Da sum them up into words that give us the overall picture? The changes with NEO 3.0 are essential to make NEO more scalable for large enterprises. But what are the other key takeaways?

We think that blockchain will take a similar route as to how the internet developed. It will be layered into different layers. TCPIP is at the bottom and HTTP protocol is on top of TCPIP.

If you are building an internet application, you don’t have to bother about TCPIP these days, you don’t even need to worry about HTTP. You have different middle layers to build on top of that. So blockchain will take a similar road.

At a basic level, is he talking about programs and applications like WordPress?

Yes, you don’t need to know how to write HTML you just use WordPress. So, for now, all the decentralized apps are built on top of layer one directly on the blockchain. But we believe that in the future, there will be different layers, a lot of layer 2 solutions.

Many (if not all) of these DApps will be built on top of layer two solutions. So we need better or native support for layer two solutions.

This is one of the reasons we need to change the architecture and also current new designs. On NEO, there are some complicated, global assets which are UTXO-based very similar to the model of Bitcoin. And we also have smart contract assets, so we want to unify the two things. In the future, there will be no more UTXO assets, or global assets, and you have to issue assets with the smart contract.

And this has the effect of streamlining and making everything faster?

Yes, everything will be unified. We want to make everything right.

Can NEO Really Pull This Off?

Staring at the magnitude of reinventing the entire NEO blockchain and essentially starting from new from a Genesis block, I wonder if Da Honfei is at all worried at the size of the task before him. He smiles slowly nodding his head.

Migration will be a great challenge. We need to have a very thought-through migration plan, we need to talk to chains and we need to talk to DApp developers so we get their support.

We don’t have a migration plan yet because the features we mentioned at the conference are possible changes. This is because we don’t have the power to decide everything, we propose, and we will look at the community’s response. The core development is not done by Erik (Zhang) alone, a lot of the contribution will come from the community.

Does he ever wonder if he’s in over his head and if it’s worth all the hassle being a pioneer in the space?

Yes, sometimes, leading a blockchain company is not like leading a centralized company. You are not owners, you are not in complete control, sometimes if you are controlling too much, the community will say you are too centralized. We have seven consensus nodes and the NEO foundation controls five of the nodes.

We are slowly in the process of decentralizing the consensus nodes. So yes, it’s like an art, you need to balance between efficiency and decentralization.

I would say probably similar, maybe better, I don’t have the statistics here with me, but I would say probably better. Ethereum currently has the strongest community of developers, they are like the go-to solution. If you want to study how to do a smart contract, you will probably do it on Ethereum. So those DApps will become like nobody will use.

I think we are not ready. The blockchain infrastructure is not ready for mass adoption, for those decentralized applications, we are a few years away from that, we need to get the layers in first.

The Takeaway

Remember all the hype about world-changing solutions and blockchain technology solving all our problems? Well, 2019 is already proving that projects have learned their lessons. The NEO team is still very much focused on what they want to achieve. They just realize that it’s further off than they thought–and it’s an industry-wide issue.

New research from Hacken System’s Crypto Exchange Ranks (CER) shows that traditional banks like JPMorgan and Bank of America dwarf the nascent cryptocurrency exchange industry.

Uptown Top Ranking

Cryptocurrency exchanges are like the banks of the industry, acting as intermediaries between traders, investors, projects and other stakeholders. But the metric used to compare exchanges (daily trade volumes) is open to abuse and manipulation. New research from Hacken System’s Crypto Exchange Ranks (CER) suggests a more accurate ranking method.

In the rampant bull market of 2017, crypto exchanges appeared to have developed into significant players in global finance. Billions of dollars of daily traded volume fuelled investors confidence that they had bought into something huge. But centralized crypto exchanges display the polar opposite of the transparency that we hold so dear in Bitcoin.

These impenetrable black boxes of power, completely conceal the way they operate, store customer assets, and make profit. The preferred method for ranking exchanges became the (often self-reported) daily trade volumes, which poses obvious issues.

Techniques such as wash-trading allow exchanges to manipulate this metric, enabling unproven new exchanges to emerge at the top of the CoinMarketCap rankings. So how can we grade the exchanges’ genuine sustainability and liquidity?

All Aboard, The Blockchain

The solution, according to Hacken, is in the blockchain itself. As an immutable ledger we can rely on the information recorded.

Therefore, the only trustworthy data about the exchanges available now resides in their cold and hot wallet balances. This information may not be falsified and can be easily verified. Likewise, anyone can observe the wallets of a particular exchange and track all their changes and movements.

This also compares to client deposits in traditional banks, reflecting the level of liabilities for each. Despite the billions of dollars in reported trade volumes, exchanges fall far behind banks when considering this metric.

Don’t Believe The Hype

Hacken compared data from the five largest US and UK banks, five local banks in emerging countries, and the five largest crypto-exchanges (according to wallet balances).

The wallet balances of the exchanges are not even visible in the chart compared to the top five US and UK banks. Even taking these banks out of the equation, and just considering the five local banks in emerging nations paints a sobering picture.

On average the crypto-trading platforms lag behind local bank deposits by a factor of 15. And their wallet balances hold over 1000 times less than the top five global banks.

These figures may look depressing compared to the billion dollar volumes we have been fed in the past. But for cryptocurrencies to grow (and there is still a lot of that needed to achieve a truly global scale), it is important to have accurate data to rely on.

Perhaps now we can put the hype behind us, and concentrate on the measured and sustainable growth of the industry.

Bitcoin.dev is no longer available on the Google .dev domain registry. This news comes amid the public rollout of the .dev top-level domain (TLD).

$12,500 for Bitcoin.dev

If you were eyeing ownership of bitcoin.dev while waiting for Google to release the new TLD officially, that chance is long gone. A redditor with the name “salsa-system” posted a couple of hours ago that Google has registered both the bitcoin.dev and blockchain.dev domains on Tuesday (February 19, 2019).

This news means that someone splashed $12,500 to lock down the .dev domain for the top-ranked cryptocurrency. That’s $25,000 in total if the same entity also acquired blockchain.dev.

As at press time, a quick check on the registry shows that ethereum.dev is unavailable but addresses like satoshi.dev and btc.dev haven’t been claimed yet. Like in other business segments, prime domain names are also highly sought after in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

.dev TLD Now Available

The news comes as Google, the owners of the .dev domain announced the public release of the new TLD in a blog post published on Tuesday. According to the statement, individuals and companies alike can utilize the early access program to acquire their preferred .dev domain names.

An excerpt from the announcement reads:

We hope .dev will be a new home for you to build your communities, learn the latest tech and showcase your projects-all with a perfect domain name.

Entities who chose to register their domains names on the day of the launch paid $12,500 in total fees. Those electing to do so today, Wednesday (January 20, 2019) will pay $3,500. By the end of February, getting a .dev domain will cost $20.

Making .dev Public Again

Currently, platforms and organizations like GitHub, Salesforce, and JetBrains are already using the new TLD. According to Google, the .dev domain is for developers and coders.

This admission by the company might in some way be an attempt to appease developers. In 2015, Google’s acquisition of the .dev TLD caused an uproar from stakeholders in the industry.

At the time, developers used the domain for their internal website testing protocols. This situation became even further exacerbated when a couple of years later, the company took the domain private, causing test webpages to stop working.

In any case, it seems like Google is starting to dip its toes into Bitcoin. Just yesterday, Bitcoinistreported that Google has introduced the Bitcoin symbol (₿) into its iOS keyboard.

Who do you think paid $22,000 to lock down bitcoin.dev and blockchain.dev domain names? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Bitcoin price has had a blistering start to the week up 10.6%, hitting highs on Tuesday of $4,000, stirring some distant memories of the 2017 bull runs. We take a pause mid-week to consider what might be next now we have already hit the target discussed on Monday.

1-Day Chart

Bitcoin price is up 1.5% ahead of the US session kicking off. With previous psychological resistance looming overhead at $4,000, BTC will have work to do to breakdown some of the sell-walls across most exchanges.

In good news for the bulls, the MAC-D on the daily chart has crossed zero for the first time since August 2018 and there are no signs of bearish divergences in this move yet.

The CMF is starting to show some sign that there the bullish pressure is starting to ease off, which is what would be expected as we reach towards $4,000.

1-Hour Chart

Taking a deep dive into the hourly chart, the bull’s push this morning is evident in the RSI, which broke out of its downward trend, having found support at 50, which is a bullish sign.

Additionally, the MAC-D has crossed bullish which is positive, but it remains to be seen if the US can keep the momentum up when traders hit their desks this morning.

Market Sentiment

Using Bitfinex looking at market sentiment, Bitcoin is displaying all of the same leveraged conditions as were witnessed before the fall from $6,000.

Although this time, the Long positions being down some 30% from 36,000 BTC, is encouraging bearing in mind that the closure of such positions is effective selling, while the price is rising, which is very bullish.

Total gross leverage in this market has plummeted, with short positions also down 23%. All of these things would imply that the market may be winding up to make an explosive move, but at this point is unclear in which direction.

Something to definitely keep a close watch over for the remainder of the week.

Bitcoin Press Release:Following the announcement of becoming the first on-chain blockchain casino to acquire a gambling license, EOSBet has recently announced two significant developments that will push adoption even further: an innovative user account system and bitcoin betting.

February 20th, 2019, Willemstad, Curacao– At the end of 2018, EOSBet received an official online gambling license and certified itself as one of the top-rated EOS dapps. EOSBet has stormed into 2019 releasing a decentralised account system along with native Bitcoin deposits and betting.

EOSBet Account System Features

Typically, interacting and engaging with blockchain technology has numerous entry barriers, such as setting up cryptocurrency wallets after going through the lengthy process of obtaining cryptocurrency in the first place.

However, the EOSBet team worked to develop a system which enables users to deposit funds from any source and easily bet without the use of a wallet or 3rd party software. This system also covers all blockchain costs for players, allowing them to play just as easily on a decentralised casino as a traditional centralised one.

Additionally, the team plans to accept BCH, BSV, LTC, DASH, DOGE, ETH, TRON, and XRP. The high-speed gameplay users have come to expect from EOSBet will not change regardless of the currency used. BET token holders will receive dividends for life in all currencies offered. To date, the platform has distributed over $2M USD as part of its Player Rewards Program.

The platform is also expected to launch two new games, a stimulating leaderboard, and a token distribution program in Q1 2019. Off to a hot start this year, the top-ranked blockchain casino is looking to take the online gambling world by storm and bring a compelling blockchain use case to the mainstream.

EOSBET is the source of this content. Virtual currency is not legal tender, is not backed by the government, and accounts and value balances are not subject to consumer protections. Cryptocurrencies and tokens are extremely volatile. There is no guarantee of a stable value, or of any value at all

City Coin is a secure and innovative cryptocurrency based on City Chain, a smart city platform that enables the design, implementation and use of next-generation services for smart cities and their inhabitants. As the first cryptocurrency to be officially adopted by a smart city, City Coin is the only medium of exchange within Liberstad. It will be used for the payment of city services and worker wages and for funding civic projects. Inhabitants can pay for anything ranging from haircuts, a dozen local eggs or an artisan loaf of bread using CITY, marking a milestone for real-world use of blockchain technology. Over 100 land plots have already been sold within Liberstad and more will become available to purchase using CITY in the near future.

While the prospect may seem farfetched, it bears remembering that Liberstad is a small city based on The Libertania Project’s principles of anarchism and non-aggression. According to its official website, it is a private city in which “all property is private and all services are performed by private actors” and founded on the belief “that all human interactions should be voluntary.”

The spokesman also told the daily national middle-market tabloid newspaper:

We are a small group of individuals who are seeking a change in the way society works. We want a society where people decide over themselves and can live together without government authorities. Liberstad will become a city where anarchism can get a physical foothold in one of the world’s most socialist countries. We also want a city where everyone has the opportunity to buy both houses and land for a price that is far below other house and cottage prices in Norway. In Liberstad you will be able to live without high mortgage or rent, and without any direct and indirect taxes. Liberstad will become a city where life is easier, more relaxing and without the high cost of living. In the long term, we can together develop a private city where people have greater freedom and opportunity to live the life they desire.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and libertarianism have long gone hand-in-hand. Liberstad and City Coin are just further small examples of what could be in store for freedom-loving individuals in the not-so-distant future.

What do you think of Liberstad and City Coin? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

The US has experienced its largest jump in bitcoin volume over the past week on LocalBitcoins. Over $31.5M worth of BTC was traded on the platform as bitcoin price looks set to test the $4000 resistance level next.

ATH USD Trading Volume on LocalBitcoins

Data from Coin Dance shows that USD trading volume on the popular over-the-counter bitcoin trading platform LocalBitcoins has reached its all-time high.

For the week ending on February 16th, LocalBitcoins saw traders exchange more than $31.5 million, nearly four times the amount exchanged the previous week ($8.4 million).

LocalBitcoins is a peer-to-peer (P2P) platform, which allows users to create and accept private sales of bitcoin for fiat currency and vice versa.

Bitcoinist reported that Indonesia has also seen a surge in Bitcoin through the platform.

Bitcoin Price Eyes $4000

Following the record values of USD volume traded on LocalBitcoins, the price of the cryptocurrency has also marked a notable increase.

At the time of writing this, Bitcoin (BTC) 00 has managed to gain over 8 percent in the past 24 hours.

As Bitcoinist reported, should the price manage to break towards the $4,000 level, this would show an Adam and Eve bottom pattern, which may allow for a further surge of the price towards $5,000.

It’s worth noting that Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency performing well through the weekend. In fact, the entire market has marked a substantial increase.

Data from CoinMarketiCap shows that throughout the last couple of days, the market has managed to gain upwards of $10 billion to its capitalization, an increase of around 9 percent.

Ethereum (ETH) 00 has also made notable gains spearheading the current cryptocurrency rally. This allowed it to once again reclaim its spot as the second largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization, unseating Ripple (XRP) 00.

What do you think of the surge in USD volume on LocalBitcoins? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!

He just doesn’t give up, does he? Self-proclaimed creator of Bitcoin, Craig Wright, now appears willing to testify under oath that he is Satoshi Nakamoto. Or that’s the conclusion Ran NeuNer draws, following Wright’s response to a comment request from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

I Promise To Tell The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing But The Truth

In December 2018, the CFTC published a Request For Input (RFI) on ‘Crypto-Assets Mechanics and Markets.’ This was primarily to understand more about Ethereum, and the differences between Ether and Bitcoin. As the CFTC is a federal agency, responses to RFIs should be… well, not fraudulent, at any rate.

On 15th February 2019, Wright posted his response, introducing himself and stating:

under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto I completed a project I started in 1997 that was filed with the Australian government… as BlackNet.

He goes on to claim that the amount of misunderstanding and fallacious information around blockchain systems (including Ethereum) has resulted in his decision to become more public.

So Dr. Craig Wright is willing to testify under oath that he is Satoshi Nakamoto and the founder of Bitcoin. pic.twitter.com/WsqHhXnQzl

It isn’t particularly relevant to the RFI, really serving only to repeat the claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto… albeit in a Federal forum.

I am Satoshi Nakamoto, And So Is My Wife

At this point, Wright’s claims are becoming a farce of Monty Python’s Life Of Brian proportions. After he first ‘came out’ as Satoshi Nakamoto, and the crypto-world widely coughed *bullshit* under its breath, he let it lie.

But now frontrunning his own project Bitcoin SV (Satoshi’s Vision), his alleged ‘amendments’ to historical documents seems to be going into overdrive. Only last week he was pulled up by WikiLeaks for altering a 2008 blog-post to make it look like he’d been working on crypto back then.

Mere hours prior, he was accused of using a forged a 2001 research paper as evidence of his lineage. It was a word-for-word copy of the October 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper. It even already had amendments that he (as Satoshi Nakamoto) made from the August 2008 draft of the same document. Oops… Or perhaps incredibly prescient?

Now, it’s alleged that even his 1997 BlackNet project was being worked on by Tim May several years before that.

Craig Wright 2019: "I completed a project I started in 1997that was filed with the Australian government .. as BlackNet.

Tim May 1997: "I use an experimental–and controversial–experiment I released on the Net several years ago, BlackNet" https://t.co/w5nyUxj17P

But What If?…

Just imagine, if all of this time, Wright has been telling the truth. What would the consequences of that be?

Obviously, Wright is such an unpopular figure that we aren’t all going to start believing (and investing) in Bitcoin SV. Although one can only imagine that this is the point of all this alleged forgery.

Why carefully protect your identity only to then come out to the world via GQ – telling the critics to “piss off!” and reminding entire countries that he’s got more money than them?

But would we all eschew Bitcoin if we found out that he had actually been the inventor?

No, of course not. Even Coldplay had a decent single before they sunk into the mire of smug, self-satisfied, insipid, irrelevance that they became. And we can still listen to that… as long as nobody else finds out.

What do you think of Wright’s latest claims? Share your thought’s below!

Bitmain Technologies has announced a new iteration of its 7-nanometer Bitcoin mining chip. The cryptocurrency mining hardware behemoth says the new and improved 7-nm chip offers greater energy efficiency for mining operations.

More Energy Efficient Bitcoin Mining

The company announced the news in a blog post published on Monday (February 18, 2019), on its official blog. According to the statement, the new BM1397 chip offers faster and cheaper cryptocurrency mining.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Bitmain’s chip supplying contractor, manufactured the chip using the former’s 7nm FinFET process. Bitmain says its new class of 7-nm chips is designed for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash that use the SHA256 Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining algorithm.

According to the company, the new mining processor provides significant improvements in power efficiency from the earlier 7-nm chips released in November 2018. An excerpt of the announcement reads:

The new BM1397 chip requires lower power and can offer an energy consumption to computing ratio as low as 30J/TH. This is a 28.6 percent improvement in power efficiency in comparison with Bitmain’s previous 7nm chip, the BM1391.

The post also revealed that new upgraded 7-nm chips would come as part of the proposed S17 and T17 Antminer models. Bitmain is yet to disclose any timetable for when these new miners will be ready for release.

Difficult 2018 for Bitmain

Bitmain will be hoping that the launch of a new mining processor will spark efforts to improve the company’s fortunes following a tumultuous 2018. A wrong bet on Bitcoin Cash saw the company reportedly incur losses more than $740 million in Q3 2018 alone.

In Q4 2018, the mining behemoth also significantly reduced its staff strength laying off entire departments. First, the company fired its Israeli-based R&D department before laying off its Bitcoin Cash development team.

Co-founders Jihan Wu and Ketuan Zhan also faced the ax, as reports emerged that the company was shopping for a new CEO.

Bitmain’s IPO plans was also another victim of the company’s difficult 2018. At the start of the year, Bitcoinistreported that Bitmain’s proposed mega mining facility in Texas was being put on hold.

Do you expect Bitmain will be able to turn the tide around in their finances in 2019? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.